HOW DO I DEFINE CULTURAL MEMORY? Cultural memory is the composite of an individual or group’s history or experience comprised of all sentient (e.g. human, earth, elemental, plant, animal) and seemingly inanimate tools and resources (e.g. furniture, art work). This can include, but not be limited to the arts, architecture, the natural environment, and griots. Each individual and group interprets these things based on prior, found, or newly created knowledge. Sometimes, the structure of a society (kinship, gender, spiritual) determines the interpretation and, therefore, the manifestation and maintenance of particular aspects of the experience and history at any given time in an individual’s or group’s existence. This composite is stored in all elements, seen and unseen, sentient and inanimate and can be accessed safely by those trained to do so. HOW DOES MEMORY CONTRIBUTE TO (A) INDIVIDUAL IDENTITY FORMATION AND (B) COLLECTIVE IDENTITY FORMATION? The individual, prior to birth, is imprinted with sensations that help shape his/her existence. Prior to birth, knowledge of all things that the individual needs and has agreed to complete during the current lifetime is present in the mind and cellular structure. In addition to this, the individual is imprinted with the sensations from the environment into which s/he will be born. Birth accomplishes two things: (1) causes the individual to consciously forget these things and (2) solidifies all that has been imprinted into genetic codes that can be traced. In some ways, one could say that the individual is a composite of memories of other people, things, events, and places. Perhaps this is why humans spend a great deal of their lives asking: Who am I? From the moment we are born, we are bombarded with sensations, images, sounds, language, and structures that supposedly help us discover who we are. These things, shared with us from our families and communities, television/film, the street, our food, our physical homes, and our own imaginings (which are often the result of all these other items that we believe and have grown attached to), take form in our energetic cellular structure and (worse) our minds. We “become” the things we eat, hear, see, and touch. An individual can be the holder of a collective identity for a group much in the same way that the griots of Mali hold the entire memory of a kingdom and people; hence why only family members born into the group are griots. In my work, I have found a single family member as the holder of the family’s memory. If that memory is caused by dysfunction or trauma in any way, that family member will often manifest some heretofore unknown disease or illness. Collective identity is shaped much in the same way as individual and in various ways. Sometimes there is a complicity that occurs consciously or subconsciously. This is evident in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village where an entire village creates a binding and spiritually fearful mythology to support the majority of the group’ s need to be safe. Collective and community identity can also be shaped by a group’s positionality or world view. If within African cultures the belief of ubuntu (“I am because you are”) is lived, then an individual is never separate from the group into which s/he is born or initiated. All events experienced by the individual become part of the group’s consciousness and vice versa. HOW IS CULTURAL MEMORY RELEVANT TO THE DESCENDENTS OF THE SLAVE TRADE? Descendents of the slave trade use “cultural memory” in their subconscious and conscious lives as a way to maintain the remnants of their original African culture. This has been demonstrated most clearly in the past 50 years with the emergence of African centered clothing, music, schools, literature, and teachings. In the past 20 years, these elements have become more public as descendents began to have pride in their ancient culture. Cultural memory is relevant to descendents of the slave trade because it allows individuals and groups to determine what and who constructs and holds memory. Within this context, they are allowed to imbue meaning into traditional (non-Western) paradigms, objects, rituals, practices, and languages. The inclusion of cultural memory as part of the anthropological, psychological, artistic, and social discourses creates a public space for descendents to reclaim and acknowledge what they know and how they know it as part of a healing, teaching, and learning process. Werner Herzog’s 1984 film, Where the Green Ants Dream greatly impacted my understanding of how a group creates and shapes identity and memory in traditional ways. In one court scene, Aborigines carefully unfold an old, beaten object that is of no consequence to anyone but them. Even more overwhelming for me is the scene of the man who stands suddenly and begins speaking. When the judge asks his attorney: “I thought you said this man was mute?” The attorney replies: “He is called mute because there is no one left who speaks his language.” What is left for descendents of the slave trade? In the United States, we are one major part of this country’s foundation. Yet, from the beginning, even as Africans built the plantation houses that enslaved them, created the art that others bought, grew the rice and tobacco of which they were allowed only a small portion, we were not considered human. We are one of the first major globalization systems and machinery of the new world. Yet, many believed what Hegel said: “Africa has no historical part of the world; it has no movement or development to exhibit… (Africans) are capable of no progress or culture, has no importance in the world.” Private and public memories of descendents have been partially shaped by those who enslaved or colonized us. We are, in many ways, a people born out of our own deaths and destruction. For some, memory became the enemy. It became safer to accept and live the new way. We have been a people eaten by our own self- hatred. For a long time, many of us were unaware of or unwilling to see that we had recreated ourselves and our minds with the images and in the images of our oppressors. We taught ourselves to forget in order to survive. Yet, my work as poet and healer has proven to me that we are a people who have not forgotten despite the lack of immediate and recognizable physical, spoken, or written forms of our origins. We left the continent with only our bodies, and our bodies became the repositories for what we could not carry. We, therefore, do not hold only the memory of the slave trade. We carry our languages, our healings, our rituals, the smell of the land, the flow of the river, and our arts with us. This is evident by the continued existence of African culture all over the world in things as diverse as music and kinship structures maintained after slavery. Africans brought to the new world the technological knowledge to craft metals, construct houses, grow rice and cotton, and to create medicines from plants. IN WHAT WAYS CAN THE BODY BE A SITE OF MEMORY? If you ask the Earth, she will reveal centuries to you without you ever having to break through her crust or uproot a tree or dig a mine. Any archaeologist will tell you that what we need to know about life on earth is held by the Earth herself. Her body is memory. Every rock, tree, or ocean floor is part of her physical structure and each has a story to tell. She is good at hiding and preserving it all (fossil discoveries) until we are capable of understanding its place in history. The earth is surrounded by the energy field that is emitted from her core. Each act of physical harm to that field disrupts the natural order of things. It is the memory stored in these fields that reminds and teaches the natural environment the cycles upon which we depend to live, grow food, have light. The human body is much the same. It is shaped by what we encounter physically and mentally. This is evident in our genetics and physical scars, and what we believe about ourselves to what we allow ourselves to forget. In 2004, I had opportunity to see the Ralph Lemon Dance Company. One of the dancers, David, had spent a great deal of time speaking to an old black Southern man as preparation and research for this work. From the moment David began dancing, I sobbed. His subtle arm and leg movements became grosser movements. As the dance progressed, it was obvious to me that David had not only absorbed the man’s conversations but had also absorbed each molecule of movement. David was too young to know the dance; yet his body remembered something ancient and intimate; he had no control of it although his training shaped the composition of the piece. While watching him, I felt as if I had been pushed into a time warp: a 21st century dancer calling on the ancient knowledge of an African dancer who had passed on information to someone in the 20th century. There are accounts from Cuba and Puerto Rico of people without connection to the Yoruba tradition dancing stories that no one has seen for 50 years. Dancing Wisdom, by Yvonne Daniels, is an important addition to the understanding of how the body serves as memory both within and outside of ritual. Within my own life, dance is a necessity as part of the remembering not only of ritual, but of stories, healings, the crossing itself. The dance, in fact, is the doorway to releasing the language of a culture I have not experienced this life. On more than one occasion, I have been asked by elders in the Diaspora not only where I learned to dance professionally, but how I remember something so old. They often thank me for taking them back home, wherever home is: Togo, Jamaica, Nigeria, or Senegal. To quote one of my own poems: “Memory comes in the slide of my foot against wood floors, in the undulation of my hips to djembe…”
